Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance by Anthony Grafton

Review by: Alina Payne

The Art Bulletin, Vol. 85, No. 2 (Jun., 2003), pp. 387-390
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Book Reviews
ANTHONY GRAFTON
Leon Battista Alberti:MasterBuilder of
the Italian Renaissance
New York:Hill and Wang, 2000. 415 pp.;
1 color ill., 27 b/w. $35.00
A fascination with Leon Battista Alberti has
become a characteristic feature of modern
Renaissance scholarship. The very periodiza-
tion structure on which our histories are
based depends on his heroic presence as a
bulwarkbetween trecento and quattrocento,
as a signpost stating "the Renaissance starts
here." Of course, Alberti did not alwaysenjoy
this privileged position. Nearer his own time,
Giorgio Vasari, although appreciative of his
writings,remained skepticalof his artisticpro-
duction and dismissed it in a few well-chosen
words. In his view,Alberti's painting was poor
("in painting his workswere neither large nor
beautiful.., much better described by him
with the pen than painted with the brush"),
and, although he was undeniably a "Vitruvio
Florentino," his architecture revealed errors
because "other than learning one must have
experience and good judgment; and this can-
not be had without constantly working with
one's hands."'1Despite such reservations,Al-
berti's authority endured. His texts, trans-
lated, commented on, and reedited in a
steady trickle from the 16th through the 18th
centuries across Europe, ensured its survival.
However, it wasJacob Burckhardtwho, in his
Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (1860),
founded the Alberti myth by singling him out
as a paradigmaticand inaugural figure for the
period. Although his description of Alberti as
a uomouniversaleset up a topos for the field, it
is Burckhardt'sother defining term for him-
Gewaltmensch (which he used as a parallel con-
cept in the arts and letters to the Gewaltherr-
scher he identified in the political domain)-
that may be even more revealing.2 Beyond his
encyclopedic scholarly accomplishments, it
was Alberti's powerful personality, as Burck-
hardt inferred from the Vita anonima, that
attracted him and allowed him to define the
Renaissance as a unique cultural moment
that resulted from a marriage between power
and art, ruthless politics and learning, all em-
bodied in a few towering personalities. Sub-
sequently, even when Burckhardtian history
lost some of its favor, this watershed and ex-
emplary Alberti-as-Renaissance-paradigm re-
mained, by now inextricably tied to the defi-
nition of the period itself and all that our
modern culture invested in the concept of a
Renaissance as golden age.
The continuing preoccupation with Alberti
has also been fed by a parallel phenomenon.
Literally embodying the power of the text in
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the art world, he has attracted scholarship
marked by a growing interest in the historyof
books, reading, and their social contexts. In-
deed, the appeal of the text (and the prac-
tices associatedwith it) has been magnetic for
scholars in the recent past just as its demise
into virtualityhas been announced either tri-
umphantly or in tones of apocalyptic doom.3
Anxiety about potential loss and revelation of
significance came hand in hand (as they tend
to do), generating an entirely new field of
study within which the ubiquitous Alberti in-
evitably claimed a place. Given this complex
mesh of historical facts and modern sublima-
tions, it should then come as no surprisethat
over time Alberti rose to the level of (proba-
bly) the most written-aboutRenaissance fig-
ure, with thirty-threebooks devoted to him
seeing the light of print in the past five years
alone.
Anointed as a Renaissanceicon for his uni-
versality, paradoxically Alberti may have
proved to be too universal for his readers. A
broad-rangingintellectual personality,he has
claimed the attention of an equally broad-
ranging spectrum of historians: of culture,
economics, literature, language, reading,
and, most frequently, historians of art and
architecture.Within these categoriesAlberti's
oeuvre has been broken down further such
that even the art theorist, the architect, and
the architectural treatise writer tend to be
contained in separate, often noncommuni-
cating scholarlyvessels.Although unquestion-
ably enriched by such targeted research, the
resulting scholarship has inevitably provided
a fractured image of his work and mono-
graphs that attempted to see the whole rather
than the parts have been correspondinglyfew
and far between. It is this formidable yet es-
sential task that Grafton sets himself in his
new book on Alberti.
To achieve this aim Grafton startsnot with
the oeuvre but with the person who propelled
the manifold activities of the intellectual,
which provides him with the necessary narra-
tive glue to connect the apparently disparate
scholarly identities of Alberti. His book thus
blends the biography and the monograph,
and in this sense belongs to a distinguished
tradition, though one that had lost ground in
the past century and has been resurrected
recently, particularly in humanism studies,
largely due to the efforts of Grafton himself
and of scholars such as Lisa Jardine, among
others.4 To be sure, this revival is related to
broader trends in the historical disciplines,
with, at one end, the second-generation An-
nales historians, who opened up the possibil-
ity of a psychological stream in history writing
by applying historical imagination to facts so
as to bring individuals back to life (Le Roy
Ladurie'sseminal Montaillou,1975, springs to
mind, as does Natalie Zemon Davis's more
recent TheReturnofMartinGuerre,1983), and,
at the other, the current interest in history-as-
fiction / narrative/ literary genre, for which
the biography has become particularlyrele-
vant.5These trends have not been lost on art
historians,whose inaugural text was, after all,
Vasari's Lives of the Artists. Flamboyant person-
alities such as Caravaggiohad kept the bio-
graphical genre going even when interest
flagged elsewhere, but it is fair to say that
recent scholarshiphas turned with great vigor
to the biography for new insights (on the
relationship between life and art, biography
as trope, as criticism vehicle, and so on)-
witness panels at CAA annual conferences,
the Getty Center's biographyyear, and publi-
cations such as Paul Barolsky'sand Richard
Spear's, not to mention articles in this very
journal.6 In fact, this groundswell is of even
larger proportions, as popular literature has
also been caught in its undertow. Given that
the separation lines between history and fic-
tion have been losing their categorical defini-
tions, literature's concomitant growing fasci-
nation with history may be seen as the flip
side of a single phenomenon that here, too, is
attached to the biography-from Marguerite
Yourcenar's Mimoires dHadrien (1951) to Na-
guib Mafhouz's Akenathen(1998) and W. G.
Sebald's documentarymemoirs-as-biographies
and, closer to our art historical home, to
Filippo Tuena's La grandeombra(on Michel-
angelo) and Alessandra Lapierre's Artemisia,
all based on meticulously consulted historical
documents.7
But even within this old and new tradition,
Grafton invests the biography with a twist of
his own, for he has a particular message to
deliver. He looks for the human side of dis-
course, and to this end he draws the psycho-
logical portrait of Alberti that he then brings
into the traditional scholarly mix of close
readings of texts and documents. To do so he
first turns to and draws heavily on the Vita
anonima(ca. 1438), which he accepts as being
"almost certainly" by Alberti (chapter 1).
From this reading he draws a psychological
portrait-warm and sympathetic-that there-
after informs how he places Alberti within the
scholarly world of his time: "a lover of friend-
ship, [he] freely shared his real and intellec-
tual property with others .... The open-
hearted man lived surrounded by bitter,
close-mouthed enemies ... . Proud, humble,
autonomous and dependent, Alberti subordi-
nated ends to means. And only capturing the
regard of others-winning applause, gaining
assent-could show that he had been success-
ful at a given task." For Grafton, the "whole"
Alberti, whom isolated studies have tended to
388 ART BULLETIN JUNE 2003 VOLUME LXXXV
lose sight of, is the "masterbuilder: the cre-
ator of new cultural systems and institu-
tions .... he built communities of hearers
and readers.., he spent much of his life ....
trying to construct languages that did not yet
exist. In the end, Alberti called into being not
only a classical theatre but a whole range of
imaginaryand real institutions: communities
of scholars, of literati and painters, of archi-
tects and patrons" (p. 27). This is how
Grafton employs the master builder of the
title, these are the themes of the book, this is
his Alberti.
The subsequent chapters (2-9) follow Al-
berti's career chronologically and pick up
these threads. Chapter 2 looks at what it
meant to be a humanist in the 1400s, more
specifically,at the plight of the humanist as it
emerges from Alberti's bitter complaints in
his On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Let-
ters. Once his father's support disappeared
with his death, Alberti was forced to make his
way as a Privatgelehrter in a complex world of
dependency and courtiership on the one
hand, and sometimes real, sometimes acrimo-
nious, not to say vicious, collegiality among
his peers on the other. Inviting commentary,
emendation, and criticism-in other words,
dialogue-is how he learned that he had to
approach the likes of Vespasiano da Bisticci,
Niccol6 Niccoli, Lapo da Castiglione,and Fla-
vio Biondo, that is, the world of the humanists
to which he sought access. An already estab-
lished practice that created a community of
readers, editors, and critics of each other's
work, it was "a coded move in the games of
formal male friendship"and a prerequisitein
his efforts to establish himself. The Life of
Potinus and the Intercenalesbelong to this pe-
riod, and Grafton draws from these writings
to illuminate Alberti's growing sense of what
it took to "playthe game."
In chapter 3 Grafton turns to Alberti's
place in the artsby wayof his dedicatoryletter
to Filippo Brunelleschi that opens the Italian
version of the treatise On Painting (1435).
Ostensiblythe chapter is focused on Alberti's
contribution to Renaissance perspective con-
struction and the paternity of that invention
Brunelleschi, but the twist Grafton
vis-a.-vis
introduces to this venerable issue is that he
associates perspective with engineering and
presents Alberti as practicing within "the
realm of the professional engineer" (p. 93).
Written by the engineer Alberti-who was in-
venting and making instruments and the
camera obscura at exactly the same time that
Brunelleschi was engaged in similar activities
in the 1410s and 1420s-Della pittura can be
seen to "closely resemble the literary efforts of
engineers like Taccola" (p. 98). How exalted
a place the engineer actually held in a world
that privileged the liberal arts above all else,
one that distinguished sharply, for example,
between celestial and terrestrial mathemati-
cians (that is, astronomers and topogra-
phers), and how keen Alberti might have
been to associate himself with this group
given his ambitions in the literary domain are
questions that Grafton does not explore.8
Nevertheless, he makes an important point:
once we see Alberti as an engineer-con-
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NUMBER 2
cerned with the practical, applied, and "ac-
tive" rather than theoretical domain-then
the thread of an Alberti particularly inter-
ested in sharing knowledge and seeing prac-
tical opportunities for collaboration gains
strength. After all, as his letter claims, he
offers his book to Brunelleschi for emenda-
tion and invites editorial commentary, even
criticism, in the interest of helping the com-
munity of painters who, he is convinced, will
find his book of much practical use. Grafton
reads this as an effort to transpose the hu-
manist's practice of intellectual collegiality
and exchange into the art world, in other
words, as Alberti'sbid to bring this world into
a "Republic"of its own, closely modeled on
that of "Letters."
This is a powerful and convincing argu-
ment. However, whether on a personal level
Alberti meant it as generously and candidlyas
he claimed, and as Grafton insists, is another
matter, and here the vexed issue of Alberti's
relationship to his famous colleague inevita-
bly comes up.9 The public nature of his letter
makes other scenarios also possible: a sce-
nario, for example, of sfida, or open chal-
lenge to a competitor (along the lines of "cor-
rect and improve this if you can"), or a
cautious move in the shape of a preemptive
rhetorical figura of modesty should (perish
the thought) some errors have crept into his
demonstration. Alternatively,and this would
easily fit into Grafton's overall theme of a
discourse-buildingAlberti, it could be an in-
vitation to Brunelleschi to write his own trea-
tise in response, and thus a public invitation
to a culture of dialogue through art writing.
Alberti's "demonstratedmasteryof the Ital-
ian technologist's methods and accomplish-
ments by his 'miracle of painting'" (p. 108) is
how Grafton connects Alberti the engineer
with Alberti the art theorist in chapter 4, on
Dellapittura.Here Graftonstaysawayfrom the
battery of issues traditionallyassociated with
it, such as the definitions of varieta, copia,
imitation, decorum, affetti, and so on, and in-
stead pursues the themes of collaboration
and discourse making that he had introduced
earlier. Historia/storia is his focus. In calling
for the creation of a new kind of painting that
did not exist before and that combined tech-
nical innovation (perspective) with classical
subject matter in the manner of relief sculp-
ture, Alberti proposed a new type of painting.
For Alberti the successful creation of such a
painting required social interaction, that is,
discussion with chance spectators invited to
evaluate, express opinions, and critique. The
art critic, like a good editor, is thus cast in the
role of intellectual adviser. Painting a picture
becomes a social process translated from the
system of humanist book production, and,
again, "collaboration" emerges as the under-
lying thrust in Alberti's definition of creativity.
What Grafton proposes, then, is nothing
short of a shift in Alberti studies: "Perhaps, in
the light of the analysis offered here, it might
prove more rewarding to look not for Alber-
tian perspective but for Albertian transactions
among painters, critics and others" (p. 139).
Of course, this "artistic discourse in the pub-
lic sphere" was not new in itself, as major
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artistic events were performed in the public
eye and the public had much to say on the
subject (the competition for the Florentine
Baptisterydoors springs to mind). But what is
new, and what Grafton rightly insists on, is
that Alberti created a site for such discussions
and turned into common artistic practice
what until then had been after all exceptional
circumstances attached to exceptional com-
missions. The actual extent of Alberti's influ-
ence, however, remains unclear: Was he re-
cording a burgeoning practice that would
have come into being with or without his
intervention and that was leading toward the
academies of the 16th century (incidentally
another translation from humanist / literary
to artisticcontexts) carriedby its own internal
momentum or was he creating this practice ex
ovo?Was he the source or was he only one
among many symptoms?
The "collaborative"aspect of perspective
construction toward its perfection is not the
only transfer of a humanist's methods that
Alberti offered, nor is his endorsement of a
discursive basis to the painter's practice.
Graftonsees Alberti'sinsistence on the sketch
as a tool toward achieving an accomplished
painting as another important instance:
"Here Alberti elegantly showed how to trans-
fer into the realm of painting a central prac-
tice of humanistic rhetoric, as he had learned
it in Barzizza'sschool: the making of elabo-
rate preparatorycollections in notebooks be-
fore producing a final text" (p. 122), and
Graftonnotes that Paolo Uccello workedwith
preparatorysketches on the equestrian por-
trait of Hawkwood at exactly the same time.
Although this can be seen as another chicken-
and-egg situation (did Alberti create the prac-
tice or is he simply codifying it?), what is
important here is that what may have been
evolving naturally into a common workshop
practice entered a prescriptive text and be-
came enshrined as recommendation-cum-
rule.
Such a reading would be entirely consistent
with Grafton's determination to stay away
from claiming "firsts"for Alberti or seeing his
contributions as inventions ex nihilo.This ap-
proach would have been tantamount to in-
scribing his biography in the traditional his-
toriography of the Renaissance as a heroic
man-made watershed in the flow of history.
Grafton's view is much more subtle than that.
Alberti's perspective construction-like his
antiquarianism, his instruments, and his liter-
ary and scientific contributions-was "not a
new world view nor a way of capturing the
three dimensional world as it really was on a
two-dimensional surface, but a brilliant fusion
of traditional theories of vision and geometry
with practical methods that evolved since the
last century" (p. 124). Still, although Grafton
mentions the medieval survivals in Alberti's
views and ideas (particularly when he dis-
cusses trecento urbanism), on the whole he
grants them little coverage (for example, Vin-
cent de Beauvais's Speculum doctrinale,the me-
dieval transmission of Xenophon, and the
family chronicle tradition are not brought up
with reference to Della famiglia), and his book
implicitly if unintentionally reinforces the no-

tion of a cleavage between medieval and Re-
naissance culture.
In chapter 5 Grafton turns to Alberti'swrit-
ings on ethics and economics, principally to
Dellafamiglia.This has long been known as a
significant text, not only by historians of early
Renaissance Florence but also by historians
of economics like Werner Sombart or Max
Weber who used Alberti at the turn of the
20th century to develop their theories on
bourgeois culture and capitalism. Modeled
on Xenophon's Oeconomicus and written in
Tuscan, Dellafamiglia was an attempt to de-
fine the cultural and linguistic identity of Flo-
rence. It also allowed Alberti to discourse on
an important phenomenon that was gaining
prominence at the time: the conflict between
piety and wealth. What he developed from his
observationsamounted to a theory of magnif-
icence that embraced all aspects of the house-
hold, including the use of artistic materials.
Here, then, Alberti is speaking to would-be
patrons and laying the groundwork for en-
lightened and responsible artistic commis-
sions. Once again, he is dealing with the re-
ality of obtaining work by creating a market
for which his particularskills, either as inter-
preter of classical wisdom (via texts) or as
artistic adviser,would be ideally suited.
In chapter6 this astuteand ultimatelysuccess-
ful self-positioning strategy-which, Grafton
shows, Alberti had learned at the knee of the
humanists he befriended early in his career-
becomes even clearer in his dealings with the
Este of Ferrara.This is Grafton'sopportunity
to raise the issue of the humanist's various
mechanisms of obtaining patronage and an-
alyze them by way of Alberti. On the lookout
for alternatives to the Curia, where he had
not gained the stability or rewards he felt
were his due, and seeking success at a secular
court, Alberti styled himself into a courtier.
His first move in his bid for Este patronage
was to write On theHorse,a treatise specifically
designed to appeal to the interests of Fer-
rara's aristocratic rulers. As he found out,
more critical still in this complex world of
relationships and influence at court were in-
termediaries who could act as brokers on his
behalf and bring him to the attention of Le-
onello d'Este. The pen once more served as
his trusted weapon. Through "coterie litera-
ture" (such as the Ludi mathematici), offered
as gifts and aimed only at a very small audi-
ence as learned as himself, Alberti reached
his brokers (Meliaduse d'Este, Guarino of Ve-
rona, Francesco Marescalco, and Poggio
Bracciolini) and ultimately obtained the pa-
tronage he sought. Establishing himself in
Ferrara as the author of On Alberti
Painting,
eventually conceived and played the role of
cultural 6minence grise that would character-
ize his interventions henceforth and establish
his fame thereafter. The motor behind vari-
ous artistic enterprises at court that show-
cased, yet again, collaboration (for example,
the competition and then collaborative
project of Niccol6 d'Este's equestrian por-
trait), Alberti also contributed to the creation
of the new popular art of medals at Ferrara.
Constructing his humanist-cum-art critic per-
sonality, Alberti "had made himself over the
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years into a deft 'service professional' for
great men" (p. 227) and thereby created a
new social type.
Chapter 7 is essential reading for anyone
concerned with the history of early Renais-
sance antiquarianism.Using Alberti as a case
study once more, Grafton illustrates and in-
sists on the collaborativeand companionable
nature of humanistic activitythat blended lit-
erary, historical, scientific, artistic, and anti-
quarian pursuits into one larger effort-diffi-
cult, messy, often fraught with danger and
unequal success-at cultural recovery.Alber-
ti's Descriptio urbis is an example of this melt-
ing pot of methodologies and accumulation
of various skills that he absorbed in the lively
world of Roman antiquarianismin the com-
pany of the likes of Bracciolini, Cyriacof An-
cona, and Biondo. The book, essentially a
series of tables of position angles, combines
cartographic techniques and methods previ-
ously known in geography and astronomy to
obtain an instrument that would help his fel-
low antiquarians in their work by allowing
them to draw the map of Rome at any scale
and locate significant monuments. In what
has by now emerged as a clear pattern,Alberti
added a unique twistto well-knownskills so as
to offer a "dramatic,public solution of tech-
nical problems" (p. 247). Likewise,his under-
water archaeological enterprise at Lake Nemi
(that allowed an ancient Roman ship to be
resurrected from its depths, only to see it
disintegrate as soon as it hit the surface) leads
Grafton to conclude that antiquarians ap-
plied "the most sophisticated engineering
and materials analyses then known to their
objects" (p. 252).
Graftonconsiders these sustained antiquar-
ian activitiesto be the context from which De
re aedificatoria emerged, and indeed, Alberti's
magnum opus does look different when seen
from this angle: the archaeological work that
lay behind De re aedificatoria was physically
demanding, complicated, full of failures,
whereas the treatise looks effortless and gives
a smooth account of antiquity. Perhaps this
was yet another effort on Alberti's part to
fulfill his ideal of the perfect courtier: all
sweatand labor erased, the fruit of decades of
work is laid before the reader as a purely
intellectual "Olympian" exercise: the process
was complete; Alberti had fashioned himself
into the "ideal counsellor in antiquity for the
erudite patrons of building whose palaces he
frequented" (p. 258). One hundred years of
treatises later and with architecture claiming
a solid literary corpus and a more confident
place among the liberal arts, Andrea Palladio,
unlike Alberti, would not hesitate to draw
attention to the rigors and dangers associated
with his archaeological work on the very first
page of his Quattro libri (1570).
In turning to De re aedificatoria, however,
Grafton leaves the usual battery of architec-
tural issues to one side and deals only with
those that illuminate his overall theme of Al-
berti as builder of intellectual communities. A
complex work, in fact, "a series of books," De
re aedificatoria displays internal tensions that
"are almost palpable" (p. 286), due primarily
to its having been written over a lengthy pe-
BOOK REVIEWS 389
riod and changed as various ancient sources
became available. Grafton offers sound evi-
dence for dating large parts of the manu-
script after 1452, that is, after Nicholas V
established the Vatican libraryand when Al-
berti was spending significantperiods of time
in the Curial environment in Rome, where
both translatorsand their books opened up
new avenues for his research-one more in-
stance of Alberti's work embedded in the
practices of a community. Following the same
thread, Grafton then focuses on Alberti's
readers, his description of the architect's
work, and his concept of decorum. What ties
these three issues together is Alberti's con-
cern with the social aspects of architectural
discourse: developing a class of architectural
commentators like himself, emphasizing the
use of models and shared responsibilityin the
work so as to invite commentary and collabo-
ration, and last but not least, deferring to
audience response in choosing appropriate
architecturaldevices both with respect to the
patron's means and the architecturalcontext
of the building.
The final chapter on Alberti's built work
has perhaps the least to contribute to a reas-
sessment of his oeuvre. Skipping from topic
to topic, Grafton does not stay as close to his
theme as he did in the previous chapters and
tends to respond more to issues raised in the
scholarly literature than pursue his own. For
example, his dialogue with Manfredo Tafuri
(Ricerca del rinascimento, 1992) on Alberti's
"smouldering discontent" (p. 305) and criti-
cism of Nicholas V and his urban vision of
Rome in the Momus and On Porcari's Conspir-
acy (which Grafton counters in a long and
well-argued passage) is illuminating but re-
mains something of an isolated vignette. The
same is true of Grafton's reading of the tri-
umphal arch motif in Alberti's church de-
signs, interesting though it is. A review of
Alberti'spractice to involve others in his work
and to incorporate feedback into his design
process to make architecture "a social and
collaborative art" (p. 319), however, adds to
his larger theme. Perhaps Grafton'smost last-
ing message here is not to seek a completely
coherent Alberti and thus add more fuel to
the fire that fed the Alberti hagiography:like
every real-life personality he harbored many
contradictions, and these, too, inflected his
discourse.
Clearly, this is not a book on Alberti the art
theorist or architect, nor is it an art historical
account of his activity, and those coming to it
with such expectations may feel short-
changed. Yet, paradoxically, it is a seminal
book for an audience of art historians pre-
cisely becauseit cuts a different path through
the heavy undergrowth of Alberti's oeuvre
and Albertian scholarship. What Grafton al-
lows us to see with great clarity and immense
learning is the actual process of making dis-
course, that is, the process of creating a lan-
guage and behavior that a group of people
can share so as to understand one another
and come together as a community. He insists
on the active, often tentative, and very human
yet essential components of the multiple
transactions and acts that make up live prac-
390 ART BULLETIN JUNE 2003 VOLUME LXXXV
tice. In this account personal interest, public
service, and search for knowledge overlap,
and are equally important. This is not Ernst
Gombrich's "The Renaissance Conception of
Artistic Progress" (1952), which also sug-
gested the presence of a collective enterprise
focused on the resolution of a common artis-
tic problem (perspective construction in this
case).10 Rather, it comes closer to a Haberma-
sian reading of discourse as activity among
many players, even if Jilrgen Habermas him-
self is not someone Grafton invokes, or per-
haps even considered.
The Alberti that emerges from Grafton's
study, then, is an Alberti who read the trends
well and placed himself adroitly within them
by claiming expertise as a scholar: he saw the
fascination with antiquity and the market it
could potentially claim; he also read well the
shifts in society associated with rising wealth.
His writings were opportunistic inasmuch as
they were meant to secure him patronage and
so spoke to these trends, but they also rein-
forced them and set them on their course.
More importantly, Alberti created or "built" a
context and set out prescriptions and proto-
cols for appropriate conduct-intellectual
and social-in the Republic of Art, which one
may argue (and Grafton does) that he actu-
ally invented.
Aside from these fundamental questions
that Grafton raises, the book is also a delight
of erudite humanist gossip and can be en-
joyed and mined at this level alone. Where
else can one discover the foibles of benevo-
lent and less benevolent critics such as
Biondo, Poggio, and Niccoli, or eavesdrop on
the altercation between Cyriac of Ancona and
an ignorant priest in Vercelli trying to pre-
vent him from copying an epitaph? How else
would we know about the glamorous ban-
quets given by Prospero Colonna in the "gar-
dens of Maecenas" at which humanists like
Biondo were invited to discuss Roman antiq-
uities but not to dine? Indeed, one could
argue that it is precisely in details such as
these that the enterprise of humanist dis-
course really comes to life and exhibits its
complex facets.
Could one have improved on this? There is
no question that Grafton makes a fundamen-
tal, indeed, brilliant contribution to Alberti
studies in particular and to the study of Re-
naissance artistic practices more generally.
But hindsight is always unforgiving and a
good book always makes one ask for more.
Some readers may miss an engagement with
the host of Alberti problems that scholars
have wrestled with for a long time. Although
he achieves a tour de force in appropriating a
forbidding bibliography, Grafton rarely takes
a position (particularly on the art historical
issues), as so much of the work is ultimately
outside his field, not to mention that it may
take several more books to cut the Gordian
knots into which these problems have twisted
themselves by now. Perhaps there is also a
missed opportunity here to look beyond the
elite-intellectual and social-as source and
destination of Alberti's efforts at discourse
making and its public. As has been recently
shown, when in Florence Alberti also inter-
This content downloaded from 185.44.78.129 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 14:34:14 PM
NUMBER 2
acted significantly with a middle-brow class of Rose, TheItalianRenaissanceofMathematics (Geneva:
merchants, to whom Della famiglia and other Droz, 1975).
of his volgarewritings were probably aimed.11 9. On Alberti's competitiveness in matters of ar-
This concern on his part to extend and chitecture, see esp. MarvinTrachtenberg, "An Ob-
servation on Alberti's Choice of Antique Models:
broaden the ranks of his readers would have
The Anxious Shadow of a Brunelleschian Anti-
been an interesting angle to pursue, particu- Canon,"in LeonBattistaAlberti:Architecttura e cultura
larly in light of Grafton's focus on the types of (Florence: Leo Olschki, 1999), 71-77.
communities and languages that Alberti 10. E. H. Gombrich, Norm and Form (London:
brought into being. But these are not so Phaidon, 1966), 1-10.
much faults as desiderata. What will cause 11. Luca Boschetto, "Leon Battista Alberti a
complaints, however, is the apparatus: the Firenze,"in LeonBattistaAlbertie il quattrocento:
Studi
endnotes, though copious, are not keyed to in onoredi Cecil Greysone Ernst Gombrich; Atti del
the text pages but to the chapters, and this convegnointernazionaleMantua ottobre1998 (Flor-
ence: Leo Olschki, 2000), 445-50. See also Luca
significantly reduces the number of times Boschetto, Leon BattistaAlbertie Firenze(Florence:
even the most committed reader will leaf Leo Olschki, 2000).
backward and forward to find a reference.
The book does not have a bibliography,
which compounds the problem, and there is MARIO CARPO
no list of Alberti's written oeuvre. While this
could have been an appendix of some pro- Architecturein theAge of Printing:
portions (though some reasoned decisions Orality,Writing,Typography,and
might have brought it into line), it is a path PrintedImagesin the Historyof
that Grafton clearly trod in the course of his ArchitecturalTheory
own research, and one that might have been
Trans. Sarah Benson
shared with the reader. These absences can
most certainly be put at the publisher's Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001. 246
door- disturbingly, as part of a larger trend pp.; 27 b/w ills. $34.95
in publishing today. Ultimately, this format
undermines precisely what Grafton so elo- In 1985 Christof Thoenes and Hubertus
quently, even passionately endorses: collabo- Gufinther published a groundbreaking essay
ration and dialogue in all Republics of Schol- whose answer to its provocative title-"The
arship. Architectural Orders: Rebirth or Inven-
tion?"-came down squarely on the side of
ALI N A PAYNE is professorat Harvard University invention.' The authors demonstrated that
[Department of History of Art and Architecture, the classical orders as we know them today
Harvard University, SacklerMuseum, Cambridge, were not, as had long been assumed, a formal
Mass. 02138]. code originally devised in antiquity that had
been abandoned and forgotten by medieval
builders only to be rediscovered in the Re-
naissance. Rather, the concept of an order
Notes and the canon of the five orders (Tuscan,
1. Giorgio Vasari,Le Vitede'piii eccelentiarchitteti, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and Composite),
pittorie scultori(1550; Turin: Einaudi, 1986), p. 357, first presented to Europe by Sebastiano Ser-
my translation. lio, were modern inventions abstracted from
2. There is no adequate translationin English of and
Burckhardt'sterms Gewaltmensch and Gewaltherrscher imposed upon the vast chaotic complex-
that preservesthe symmetricalrelation between the ity of ancient buildings and texts in a fraught
terms power,man, and ruler.S.G.C. Middlemore- archaeological and exegetical process that en-
who published the only English translation of The gaged numerous architects, theorists, and hu-
Civilizationof the Renaissance(1878)-translated manists.
them as "giant"and "despot"respectively. In part 1 of the joint publication, Thoenes
3. For a review of these trends, see Robert Darn- showed that in the
quattrocento and early
ton, "The New Age of the E-Book,"New YorkReview the number, names, and se-
cinquecento
of Books,Mar. 18, 1999, 5-7.
quence of the orders, what properly consti-
4. Anthony Grafton,JosephScaliger(Oxford: Clar- tutes an order, and even what to call the
endon Press, 1983); idem, Cardano's Cosmos(Cam-
word order (ordine) ap-
bridge, Mass.:HarvardUniversityPress, 1999); and phenomenon-the
Lisa Jardine, Erasmus,Man of Letters(Princeton: peared as but one choice among many, not to
Princeton UniversityPress, 1993). mention that it also could signify quite differ-
5. See the spirited account and critique of this ent things-were anything but stable. That so
movement in Roger Chartier,Au bordde la falaise: much was
up in the air and had to be created
L'histoireentre certitudeset inquittude(Paris: Albin from scratch was largely because neither the
Michel, 1998).
6. Paul Barolsky,Michelangelo's Nose:A Mythand concept
nor the word order appeared in the
ItsMaker(UniversityPark,Pa.:Penn State University Roman text that supposedly gave us both:
Press, 1990); Richard Spear, The "Divine"Guido: Vitruvius's On Architecture.
Religion,Sex,Money,andArtin theWorldof GuidoReni If the idea and terminology of the orders
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); and emerged only as the result of much collective
Philip Sohm, "Caravaggio'sDeaths,"Art Bulletin84 effort, equally complex was the related pro-
(Sept. 2002): 449-68. cess by which the morphology and formal
7. On the creative exchanges between history
attributes of individual orders came to be
writing and popular art forms-in this case established and the different
film-see Natalie Zemon Davis's prefatory com- types visibly dis-
ments in TheReturnof Martin Guerre(Cambridge, tinguished one from the other. This was as-
Mass.:HarvardUniversityPress, 1983). tutely laid out in the second part of the essay,
8. On this hierarchy,see the classic study by Paul where Gunther examined the detailed studies
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